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Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives
There are sets of PIFs from the campaign "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives". Classmates - 1987 The first PIF to kickstart the campaign. Nicknames: "Permanently Absent" Description: Depicting a class of children who lost one of their own classmates to a drunk driver. The camera is shown moving from the teacher to rows of children, each narrating their reactions to news of the boy's death, ending on a close friend of the deceased at the back of the class seated next to a now empty chair. FX/SFX: Live action. Music/Sounds: The dialogue from the narrator. Availability: Used to be shown on TV. Now seen on some YouTube videos. Scare Factor: Medium to high, due to the dark enviroment and the horrible truth of the narrator's best friend. Kathy Can't Sleep - 1990 Directed by Tony Kaye. Description: The camera shows a little girl named Kathy watching while her mother shouts and rages at her father, who has been convicted of killing a child while driving under the influence. Kathy's expression deteriorates throughout. The dialogue also implies that her entire family's reputation has been destroyed. We cut to the tagline from the previous PIF, now with the Safety on the Move logo. FX/SFX: Live-action. Music/Sounds: We just hear the mother yelling at her husband about the accident. "How can she forget about it?! She can't even sleep! She heard a kid at school say you were a murderer. I don't know what to tell her! How am I supposed to explain, that you killed a little boy?! I won't ever understand why you had to drive! Now everything's screwed up! Isn't it? Well isn't it?! LOOK AT ME!!!" Availability: Used to be shown on TV. Now seen on some YouTube videos. Scare Factor: High, due to how the mother yelling at her husband for his reckless and drunk driving that killed a boy. Eyes - 1992 Description: Depicts a young girl who has been run over by an intoxicated driver. The camera focuses on her blank, lifeless eyes as an ambulance team attempt to revive her while the driver attempts to say sorry. At the end, she is pronounced asystolic, meaning that her heart has stopped and death is likely imminent. FX/SFX: Live-action. Trivia: The woman is played by Denise van Outen. Music/Sounds: Dialogue from the driver and paramedics. Availability: Used to be shown on TV. Now seen on some YouTube videos. Scare Factor: High to Nightmare. The graphic footage of a dead woman isn't just frightening, but also sickening. Arguably one of the scariest PIFs ever In the Summertime - 1992 Description: With a soundtrack of the Mungo Jerry song "In the Summertime" (one of the lines of which is "Have a drink, have a drive..."), a group of friends are drinking in the beer garden of a pub on a warm summer's evening. As a car departs from the pub, we see one pub-goer cease smiling after catching sight of something shocking. As the music suddenly slows down and dies away, the camera then focuses on the car which has run off the road and into a tree, killing the occupants inside. The slightly different tagline was "In the summertime, drinking and driving wrecks even more lives." FX/SFX: Live-action. Music/Sounds: "In the Summertime" plays in the first thirds of the PIF, until it slows down to silence when the drunken friends are killed in the car crash. Trivia: This entry was devised to challenge the popular misconception that driving under the influence is only a serious problem at Christmas, the usual time for anti-drink driving PIFs to be shown. The ad proved to be so popular that it was repeated in 1994, along with a print ad campaign. One of the actors, Hugo Speer, was involved in an actual case of drunk driving in 2009, many years after this PIF was released. He crashed at a traffic island but no one was injured in the incident. Availability: Used to be shown on TV. Now seen on some YouTube videos. Scare Factor: Low to High, because this pif (unlike the others) isn't nearly as graphic but the aftermath can still scare people Dave - 1995 Nicknames: "The Side Effects of Peer Pressure", "One More, Dave" Description: A woman is in a kitchen liquidising Christmas dinner, with voices in the background of men in a pub encouraging their friend to have another drink. He refuses, saying that he is driving, but they urge him "Come on Dave, just one more." The woman is then seen feeding the liquid concoction to her now quadriplegic son, and when he can't swallow it, she encourages "Come on Dave, just one more". FX/SFX: Live action. Music: N/A Sounds: Other than the men talking, we can briefly hear the blender chopping up the food and towards the end, we can hear Dave's heavy breathing... haunting stuff. Trivia: Surprisingly enough, this PIF was made for Christmas. It's made more obvious when you look at all the decorations around the house. Dave was played by Daniel Ryan. Availability: Same as all of the above, used to be shown on TV. Now seen on some YouTube videos. Scare factor: High to Nightmare. Due to how Dave's life was completely destroyed by peer pressure from his friends, and how the aftermath is shown. Pudding - 1993 Description: A woman's Christmas dinner with her family is interrupted when the phone rings to inform her that her boyfriend (who had been drinking at another party) was killed on the road, and the burning Christmas pudding on the dinner table then turns into the wreckage of a burning car. Again, the slightly different tagline was "Drinking and driving wrecks Christmas". FX/SFX: Live action. Availability: Used to be shown on TV, now seen on YouTube. Scare factor: High bordering on Nightmare. Mark - 1990's Description: This advert shows a ghostly face of a man that talks about his best friend Mark, who is ostensibly "a great bloke" but after going on a night out and having "only a quick one", he caused an accident which killed a couple, leaving their children as orphans. FX/SFX: TBA Trivia: This PIF challenged public perceptions that you have to be drunk to cause a serious drink driving accident. Scare factor: Nightmare. Category:PIFs Category:Video PIFs Category:1990's PIFs Category:1980's PIFs Category:Health PIFs Category:Safety PIFs Category:United Kingdom Category:Television PIFs Category:Drunk Driving PIFs Category:Nightmare-rated PIFs